Sometimes stories don't need nut grafs, said Ken Wells from The Wall Street Journal.

What? I didn't know if I'd heard him correctly. My fingers froze and the exact quote escaped me. But he wasn't going to catch me off guard with my note-taking again.

"In today's world of journalism, we're pressed for time and space -- we're beginning to lose sight that every story doesn't need to have a point," Wells said. "Sometimes stories are stories because they are great stories."

It was as if I had stepped into a mirror universe, like the one Captain Kirk was trapped in during that episode of "Star Trek" when he met a goateed Evil Spock.

No sentence about the big social context? No pin-the-trend-on-the-donkey??

No (dramatic pause) "he is not alone"??

This mustached mirror of an editor was an advocate for ditching that roadblock-of-a-sentence that most writers try to leave out when writing a stylized beginning, hoping the editor won't notice its absence.


Wells admitted he's a rare editor, a "radical" one, the likes of whom would probably not be found in other newsrooms. "The strongest desire is not to love or hate, but to change someone's copy," he said.

The best way a writer can get an editor to overlook a rule is to write cleverly enough for the editor to let it pass. Wells said the best way to do so is still grounded in the basics of journalism: "It's the reporting, stupid."

"Most editors know that the best writers really can break the rules, and we should encourage that," he said.

Rules be damned is right. Maybe I should grow a goatee.

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National Writers Workshop -- Fort Lauderdale Archive

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